there is a tomato plant
behind selvi akka’s building
growing out of an old blue paint bucket
split down one side
like somebody meant to throw it away
and forgot halfway through.
selvi akka says she never planted it.
selvi akka also says
ilaiyaraaja once ate bajji
from her cousin’s tea stall in kodambakkam
so you can believe what you want.
every year
right after the first hard summer rain
that little plant climbs the back wall again.
weak-looking at first.
leaves hanging tired
like they got no business trying.
then one hot week later
it is everywhere
twisting through the grill gate
like the whole place belongs to it.
last year
a boy with a camera
stood near the drainage canal almost half an hour
taking pictures of it.
selvi akka watched from upstairs
without saying a word.
that was unusual.
the corporation workers complain about it.
kids knock the green tomatoes down with chappals.
one man from the first floor
tried plucking a few once
and selvi akka came downstairs in her nightie
shouting so loud
every window opened at the same time.
funny thing is
nobody there even cooks with tomatoes that much anymore.
still
every summer
that plant comes back
acting like it knows something.
like
it knows something
the rest of us don’t.
-
selvi akka’s tomato plant
-
1.618 (Approximately)
Audrey Hepburn Here is a secret about photographs. The most important tool in a photographer’s kit is not the camera. It is the crop. I have taken a great many photographs in my life, and I am fairly certain I have made more crops than clicks. The photograph arrives first. The decision comes later. You drag the little handles. You nudge the frame left, then up, then back. You are not thinking about mathematics. You are not thinking about ancient Greece. You are thinking, if you are thinking at all, something like “no, no, there”. And you stop. Nobody teaches you how to do this. There is no class called Introduction to Cropping for the Mildly Uncertain. You figured it out the way you figured out which side of the pillow is the cool side: through a private, inarticulate conviction you would struggle to defend under oath. You can spend forty-five minutes in a toothpaste aisle, paralyzed by the difference between “whitening” and “advanced whitening,” which, as far as anyone can tell, is the word advanced. But a photograph you fix in four seconds with a breezy confidence.
Golden ratio (or whatever) There is a name for what you just did. Or rather, there is a name for the neighborhood of instinct you wandered into. It carries the faint, reassuring whiff of ancient Greek authority, which is the best kind of authority, because the people who held it are all dead and cannot appear on a podcast to correct you. It is called the golden ratio. The golden ratio is approximately 1.618. It is represented by the Greek letter phi (φ), because mathematicians enjoy naming things after symbols most people cannot type without assistance. The number comes from a relationship so simple it feels like it shouldn’t matter: the ratio of the larger part to the smaller is the same as the ratio of the whole to the larger part. If that sentence made you feel like you were being lowered into deep water, don’t worry. The number has never once required your understanding. It has been showing up uninvited for twenty-five centuries and is not about to stop now.
And it shows up everywhere. The Parthenon, we are told, was built to golden-ratio proportions. Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could not finish a painting if you held a crossbow to his head but who could start one like nobody in the history of civilization, allegedly embedded it in the Mona Lisa, in the Vitruvian Man, in what appear to be the margin doodles of a catastrophically overcommitted genius. The nautilus shell supposedly spirals in a golden curve. Sunflower seeds arrange themselves in Fibonacci sequences that converge toward phi. The proportions of Audrey Hepburn’s face, we are told, conform to the ratio, which, if true, means that mathematics itself looked at Audrey Hepburn and said, “yes, that one”. Your face, if it happens to be attractive, is said to obey the ratio. Your face, if it does not, is said to be “interestingly asymmetrical,” which is what people say when the math has gently let you down. Over the centuries, the golden ratio has accumulated a reputation that most numbers would find mortifying. It has been called the divine proportion, the secret of beauty, the mathematical signature of God. That is a lot of pressure for a number that is, at the end of the day, just sitting there being irrational. There are books about it. There are TED talks about it. There are graphic designers who will charge you eleven thousand dollars to apply it to your company logo, though what they are mostly applying is a rectangle.
The whole thing feels wonderful, for a while. Here is one number, precise and eternal, that explains why certain things look right. Why the curve of a seashell pleases you. Why that photograph, once cropped, felt suddenly correct. It suggests that beauty is not a matter of taste, not some argument you are going to lose to a friend who went to art school. It suggests that beauty is structural. The universe has preferences, and miracle of miracles, they resemble yours.
The trouble begins when someone actually checks. Take the Parthenon. It is undeniably beautiful, and it does contain rectangles, and some of those rectangles are in proportions close to the golden ratio, if you are flexible about where you start measuring and where you stop. Do you include the steps? The pediment? The parts that have not survived the last two thousand years or so? Depending on what you choose, you can find the ratio, or something near it, or something not particularly near it that you can describe as “approximately golden” if you squint and deploy the word approximately. The nautilus shell has a similar problem. Its spiral is gorgeous and logarithmic, but its actual ratio is closer to 1.33 than 1.618. Calling this the golden ratio is like calling someone six feet tall when they are five foot four. You can do it. But only if you have a very relaxed relationship with accuracy. As for da Vinci, look, he almost certainly knew about the ratio. He illustrated a whole book on it (his friend Pacioli’s book). Whether he deliberately planted it in his paintings is another matter. You can lay a golden rectangle over the Mona Lisa and it will frame her face nicely. You can also lay it over a photograph of a Taco Bell and it will frame the drive-through menu nicely. The rectangle is not a detective. It does not find beauty. It is just a shape. The finding is being done by the person holding it, who arrived with a theory and, surprise, left with confirmation. Spend any time on the internet and you will recognize the dynamic.
In 1876, a German psychologist named Gustav Fechner did something radical. He asked people a question. He showed them rectangles, tall ones, wide ones, squares, all the rectangles he could lay hands on, and asked which they found most pleasing. That was the whole study. No theory, no golden anything, no prompting. Just: which rectangle do you like? The results showed a strong preference for rectangles near the golden ratio. This was taken as proof. The ratio wasn’t just in temples and seashells. It was in us. Hard-wired. An aesthetic instinct so deep it came before language, before culture, before anyone had ever had an opinion about fonts. Except. Later studies found that the preference was fuzzier than Fechner claimed. People didn’t converge on 1.618 like homing pigeons. They converged on a range. They liked rectangles longer than a square but not absurdly so. They hated extremes. They wanted something balanced but not symmetric, alive but not chaotic, interesting but not trying too hard. They wanted, basically, the visual equivalent of the person at a dinner party that everyone is secretly hoping to be seated next to. The golden ratio lives in that zone. But it doesn’t own it. What Fechner had discovered was not that humans love a specific number. He had discovered that humans love a specific kind of balance. A balance that avoids perfection. A balance with room to breathe. The kind you recognize when you see it, in a photograph or in a face.
There is a term for this in design. It is called dynamic symmetry and it actually describes something rather profound. Static symmetry is a mirror. Left matches right. Nothing surprises you. It is bland like a passport photo or a tax form. It is satisfying the way folding laundry is satisfying, orderly and complete and nobody’s idea of a good time. Dynamic symmetry is balance through inequality. A large shape on one side answered by a small one on the other. The composition holds because the mismatches resolve.
Wes Anderson Frame Think of a Wes Anderson frame, symmetrical, composed, almost oppressively precise. Now think of a Spielberg frame, off-centre, weighted to one side, somehow more alive for it. Both work. But only one makes you lean forward. The golden ratio is one flavor of dynamic symmetry. It is not the rule. It is a description, after the fact, of something we were already inclined to do. A mathematical Post-it stuck to an instinct that got there first.
Schindler’s List (Spielberg Frame) I am writing this on a Saturday afternoon in May. The coffee is cold. I keep getting up to look at the bird feeder at the neighbor’s house, which a squirrel has been working on for an hour and a half now with the dogged optimism of a creature that has confused effort with progress. I mention this because I am about to make a turn in the essay, and the turn is going to feel a little abstract, and I want it on the record that I have been thinking about a squirrel.
Here is the turn. If the golden ratio were a law of beauty, a real law, the way gravity is, then beauty would be something we discover. We would find it the way we find a planet. It would be there whether we showed up or not. That is not what happens. What happens is: we see a shell, and something in us responds. We build a temple, and it stirs something we didn’t expect. We crop a photograph, and the frame clicks into place with a rightness that is almost physical. Then, only then, we go looking for the reason. We measure. We overlay spirals on the image. And when the numbers land somewhere near 1.618, we say there it is, proof that beauty is mathematical. But the feeling came first. The measurement came after. We did not discover beauty in the ratio. We discovered the ratio in things we already found beautiful. And there is a difference between those two sentences that is, depending on your patience for that kind of phrasing, either enormous or annoying. We are pattern-completing animals. We see two dots and a curved line and we see a face. We hear three notes and we finish the melody. We read half a sentence and we are already building the other half before our eyes arrive. This is what your brain does all day, at breakfast, in traffic, during meetings you are pretending to pay attention to. We take the incomplete and we make it whole, so fast and so constantly that we have mistaken this for the world being orderly when in fact it is us, frantically ordering it. Beauty, whatever beauty actually is, seems to live in the gap between the pattern and its completion. Not in the pattern. In the moment of recognition. When the crop lands or when the chord resolves. The golden ratio captures one frequency of that recognition. A proportion where the tension is just noticeable and just resolved. But the ratio is not doing the work. You are.
Something else. The ratio is not the only system that sells itself this way. We are surrounded by frameworks that arrived after the fact and now insist they came first. The bestseller list does not tell you which book is good. It tells you which book a great many people bought, which is a different question, though the list is happy to let you confuse them. The Rotten Tomatoes score does not tell you whether you will love a film. It tells you the average reaction of strangers, processed through an aggregation rule someone in an office decided was reasonable. The algorithm that decides what plays next does not know what moves you. It knows what people who resemble you have clicked on, which is not the same thing, and has never been the same thing, no matter how many times the autoplay starts before you are ready. These systems do what the golden ratio does. They take a wide, messy range of human preferences and hand it back to you as a number. They convert “you found this beautiful” into “this is, by measurement, beautiful”. And then they quietly suggest you might want to update your taste accordingly.
The trick is the same trick. The feeling came first. The measurement came after. But by the time the measurement arrives, dressed up in authority and decimal places, it begins to look like the source rather than the description. You start checking the score before you trust your own response. You wait to see what the room thinks before you decide what you think. You measure your enjoyment of a film against its Metacritic average and feel vaguely embarrassed if the numbers don’t agree. And over time, the measurement stops reflecting the preference and starts shaping it. This is the real lesson the golden ratio almost teaches us. It is that we are forever inventing systems to tell us what to feel, and then forgetting that we invented them. The ratio is harmless. Most of these systems are harmless too. But the instinct underneath, to outsource recognition to something that looks more authoritative than your own response, is worth noticing. You already know how a photograph should be cropped. You already know which sentence in a paragraph is the one that landed. You already know which song you want to hear again. The number can come later, if it comes at all. It is allowed to describe the preference. It is not allowed to replace it.
I have been doing the same thing writing this essay. A paragraph got too long and something said break. The argument drifted into abstraction and I pulled it back to a photograph, a shell, a rectangle, because the concrete thing felt right and the abstract thing was starting to feel like a lecture, and nobody wants that. I have been cropping this essay the entire time. And so have you. You skimmed where it dragged. You slowed where it surprised you. You have been composing your reading the way I have been composing my writing, and neither of us used a formula.
The golden ratio is exactly 1.6180339887498948482. It will continue forever. It will never repeat. It will never resolve. Neither will the instinct it is trying to describe.
-
The Jar Under the Apple Tree
The hook was at the exact height of the average adult human skull, which is the kind of thing you only notice once.
Many years ago, I worked in an office in a downtown I will not name, in a building whose interior architectural decisions had been made by people who I can only assume were no longer available for comment. The door of my office, when closed, presented a coat hook. The coat hook was positioned, through some collaboration between the original carpenter and the laws of probability, at exactly that height. The hook itself was not the problem. The hook was, by any reasonable measure, doing exactly what hooks do, which is essentially nothing. It hung there. Coats found it. Civilization proceeded. If you were grading hooks on professional conduct, this hook would have been in the upper percentile, possibly receiving a small annual bonus.
The problem was a friend of mine. He was, and remains, one of the most animated talkers I have ever known. A man who could not deliver a piece of news, however small, without committing his entire upper body to the project. He came into my office one afternoon to tell me something I no longer remember, closed the door behind him out of habit, and leaned back against it in the way he leaned back against everything, with the full and undefended weight of a man who had never in his life considered the question of what was directly behind his head.
I saw it happen before it happened. I saw the small sequence. The lean. The contact. The pause of confusion that precedes the realization. Then a level of vocalization that suggests we have departed conversation entirely and entered a different category of human experience, one that involves forms. So I cupped the back of his head with my palm, and moved him forward by a few inches, like a piece of furniture I had suddenly developed strong opinions about. He stopped mid-sentence. He looked at me. I looked at him. We agreed, without speaking, never to discuss what had just happened, and he went on telling me whatever he had been telling me, and I went on listening, or rather pretending to listen, because the part of my brain that listens had been temporarily reassigned.
The thing I want to tell you is not that I did this. The thing I want to tell you is that I did not decide to do this. It was already happening. By the time I noticed it was happening, it had happened. Some part of me had run the entire calculation. The lean, the impact, the email I would have to send afterward. And it had dispatched my hand on a small mission of pre-emptive intervention before the rest of me had finished forming an opinion about it. He continued his story. I continued my pantomime. Nothing in the conversation acknowledged that one of us had just briefly seceded from the meeting in order to avert an injury that the other one was in no danger of sustaining.
I started noticing it everywhere. A glass tips. Your hand is already there. A child stumbles. You are crouching before you remember the verb for crouching. There is a particular genre of short video that I have come to find quietly mesmerizing. A parent walking with a toddler, and at some point the toddler does something the toddler did not warn anyone about, and the parent’s hand simply arrives, palm out, between the child and a piece of furniture that was about to teach the child a lesson nobody wanted them to learn yet. The parent keeps walking, keeps talking, keeps doing whatever the parent was doing. The hand was already there. The video is six seconds long, and you can find a thousand of them.
It is, on the whole, an extraordinarily useful arrangement. If every action required formal approval from the conscious mind, most of us would spend a great deal of time watching things fall. But it does create a peculiar hierarchy. Because once a behavior has been moved into this layer, it stops negotiating with you. The hook did not care that the person standing in front of me was telling me something that was, by any reasonable measure, more important than the structural integrity of his skull. The system had already decided. It would run. And I, the official executive of my own life, had been informed only as a courtesy.
You can see versions of this elsewhere, if you start looking. A small bird, finding a predator near its nest, will perform a strangely theatrical injury, dragging one wing as though it has just remembered a previous engagement with gravity, to lure the predator away from something smaller. An animal will position itself between danger and its young with a decisiveness that suggests this is not the first time the situation has arisen, even when, in the literal sense, it is. There is a quality to these actions that is hard to miss once you have seen it. They do not look considered. They look pre-written.
⸻
In the autumn of 1942, in Warsaw, there was a woman who was about to develop a problem that did not admit of hesitation. Her name was Irena Sendler, and she was, on paper, a social worker. The paper, as it turned out, was the useful part. Her credentials gave her permission to enter the Warsaw Ghetto on the grounds of inspecting for typhus, a disease the German occupiers were terrified of and consequently reluctant to investigate too closely themselves. The ghetto at that point contained roughly four hundred thousand people pressed into an area meant for a small fraction of that number, and among those four hundred thousand were children whose situation, in the autumn of 1942, was beginning to clarify itself in a way no one wanted to look at directly.
Irena Sendler Sendler began removing them. The methods were, by the standards of any reasonable description, improvised. Children were carried out in toolboxes, which had to be the right size and which had to contain a child who had been taught, somehow, in advance, not to make a sound. Children were carried out in sacks, in suitcases, in the false bottoms of carts. Older children were walked through sewers. Infants were sedated and placed under stretchers in ambulances, beneath the legs of adults who had been instructed to look bored. A mechanic named Antoni Dabrowski drove one of the ambulances, and his dog, who had been trained for this, would bark whenever they passed an occupier’s checkpoint, loudly enough to cover any sound a sedated infant might unexpectedly produce. The dog was, I want to note, a participant in this. The dog had a job and it did the job.
Each removal would have required a decision, if the system had been built to require decisions. The cost of being caught was not ambiguous. Sendler knew this because in October 1943 she was caught, and what happened was that the Gestapo broke both her feet and both her legs and sentenced her to be shot. She was not shot, in the end. Zegota, the underground organization she worked with, bribed a guard, who added her name to the list of executed prisoners and let her escape into a country where she would have to remain in hiding for the rest of the war.
If Sendler had been operating on a model where each child required fresh deliberation, the system would have collapsed under the accuracy of its own arithmetic. The risks were too large. The cost of being caught was too clear. Any honest internal accounting, performed in real time, in the moment, with full information, would have produced a number of children significantly closer to zero than to two and a half thousand. Two and a half thousand is the number of children Sendler and her network removed from the Warsaw Ghetto.
She wrote their names down. She wrote their real names, and the names they had been given for their new identities, and the addresses of the families and convents and orphanages where they had been placed, on small pieces of cigarette paper. She rolled the papers up. She placed them in glass jars. She buried the jars in the garden of a friend’s house at 9 Lekarska Street, beneath an apple tree, because she believed, correctly, as it turned out, that if she did not survive the war, someone would need to know who these children had been, in order to give them back to whatever was left of their families when whatever was left of their families came looking. She kept going. She kept going through 1942, through 1943, through her own arrest, through everything that should have been a stopping point and was not.
And here is the thing that I want to say carefully, because I think it is the thing that is usually missed about her, and about the very small number of people in any given catastrophe who behave the way she did.
They were not her children.
⸻
There is a temptation, when encountering a story like this, to reach for words like courage, or sacrifice, or goodness. Those words are accurate as far as they go. They are also, in a particular way, a little lazy, because they describe the behavior as if it were something chosen each time, weighed each time, decided each time, by a person standing at a moral fork in the road with the leisure to think about it. What you are actually looking at is something else. You are looking at a system that does not wait to be chosen.
The bravery is not absent. It has been moved. It happened once, somewhere earlier, in a decision that the woman walking back through the gate with an empty toolbox no longer has to make. Some commitments, made deeply enough and early enough, get moved out of the part of the mind that deliberates and into the part of the mind that simply runs. They stop being decisions. They become behaviors. And behaviors, unlike decisions, do not require the person performing them to be brave at the moment of performance. They require the person performing them to have been brave once, long ago, at the moment of installation.
This is, structurally, the same thing that was happening with the coat hook. Just so I’m clear, I am aware of the size of this comparison and I am not trying to flatten it. The hook is small. Sendler is not. But the mechanism, the thing where the body moves before the deliberating mind has been consulted, the thing where some category of event has been placed on a list of events that are not allowed to occur, is the same mechanism. The hand that moves to catch the back of a head that was not actually going to be injured is operating on the same wiring as the hand that moves to lift a child into a toolbox. The only difference is what has been pre-committed, and how deeply, and at what cost.
Most of what we admire in other people, when we look closely, turns out not to be a series of admirable choices. It turns out to be a single choice, made once, that has been moved so far upstream of the moment of action that it no longer feels like a choice at all. It feels like temperament. It feels like instinct. It feels, to the person doing it, like nothing in particular. The instinct that lifts a child who is not yours into a toolbox is not, technically speaking, an instinct. It was installed. Somebody installed it. Somebody decided, at some point, possibly without knowing they were deciding, that certain categories of event were not going to be allowed to unfold in their presence if they could help it. And then they stopped having to decide.
This is the part of the story we usually skip, because it is harder to celebrate than courage. Courage is a moment. This is an architecture. Courage gets a medal. This gets a coat hook, and a hand that moves before the rest of you has been informed.
⸻
Most of the time, nothing happens. Which is, when you think about it, the entire point. The system exists so that nothing happens. The visible outcome of a working pre-commitment is the absence of an event. No one notices it, because there is nothing to notice. The injury that didn’t occur, the child who lived, the head that didn’t meet the hook, these all share the same characteristic, which is that they do not show up in any account of the day. They show up only in the negative space, in the things that should have happened and didn’t, because somewhere upstream a decision was made once so it would not have to be made again.
We don’t decide to move. We move.
-
சுஜாதாவுக்கு ஒரு இடம்
2008-ல் சுஜாதா மறைந்த போது sujathaology.com என்று ஒரு வலைத்தளம் ஆரம்பிக்க நினைத்தேன். அந்த டொமைனை வாங்கினேன். அதோடு சரி. பதினெட்டு வருடங்கள் கழித்து இப்போது sujatha.space என்ற பெயரில் ஒரு டிஜிட்டல் மியூசியம் கட்டிக்கொண்டிருக்கிறேன். தமிழிலும் ஆங்கிலத்திலும். இணையத்தில் சுஜாதாவை அறிந்து கொள்ள, புரிந்து கொள்ள ஒரு இடம்.
இன்று அவருடைய பிறந்தநாளுக்கு வலைத்தளம் இயங்கிக் கொண்டிருக்கிறது. புத்தகங்களின் பட்டியல் இருக்கிறது. அவர் எழுதிய திரைப்படங்களின் பட்டியல் இருக்கிறது. அடுத்த கட்டம் படங்கள், புத்தக அட்டைகள். இரண்டு மாதங்களாக நேரம் கிடைக்கும் போதெல்லாம் வேலை செய்து கொண்டிருக்கிறேன். இவ்வளவு முடிக்கவே நேரம் ஆகிவிட்டது.
இதில் ஒரு பகுதி மட்டும் இன்னும் வரவில்லை, சுஜாதா AI.
சுஜாதா மாதிரியே பதில் சொல்லக்கூடிய ஒரு AI மாடல் கட்ட முயற்சி செய்கிறேன். ஆனால் அவருடைய எழுத்தை அதற்குக் கொடுக்க முடியாது, காப்புரிமை இருக்கிறது. அதனால் வேறு வழிகளில் முயற்சி செய்துகொண்டிருக்கிறேன். எப்படிச் செய்தாலும் சுஜாதா போல பதில் வராது என்கிறது. இது சுஜாதாவை மீண்டும் கொண்டுவரப்போகிறது என்று நான் சொல்லவில்லை. அப்படிச் செய்யவும் முடியாது. ஒரு மனிதரின் மூளையை, அவரின் கேலியை, அவரின் டைமிங்கை, ரெண்டு வரியில் ஒரு சித்திரம் வரைகிற அந்த மாயத்தை எந்த கம்ப்யூட்டரும் முழுவதுமாகப் பிடிக்க முடியாது. முயற்சி செய்யலாம்.
அவர் விட்டுப் போன இடம் இன்னமும் வெற்றிடமாய்த்தான் இருக்கிறது. உலகம் இன்னொரு போரில் இறங்கியிருக்கிறது, சுஜாதா என்ன எழுதியிருப்பார்? ஐம்பது வருஷம் கழித்து மனிதர்கள் மீண்டும் சந்திரனுக்குப் போகிறார்கள், அவர் என்ன சொல்லியிருப்பார்? ரோபோக்கள் வீட்டுக்கு வந்துவிட்டன, கார்களே ஓட்டிகளை விரட்டுகின்றன, ஒரு பத்தியில் அவர் எப்படி இதைச் சுருக்கியிருப்பார்? பெங்களூர் டிராஃபிக்கில் இரண்டு மணி நேரம் சிக்கிக்கொண்டு, பக்கத்து காரில் ஒருவர் வீடியோ காலில் யோகா கிளாஸ் எடுத்துக்கொண்டிருப்பதைப் பார்த்தால் அவர் எழுதியிருக்கக்கூடிய அந்த ஐந்து வரி குறிப்பு என்னவாயிருக்கும்?
சுஜாதாவே அவருடைய AIயைப் பார்த்திருந்தால் முதலில் சிரித்திருப்பார். பிறகு அதன் குறைபாடுகளை ஒரு கட்டுரையில் பட்டியலிட்டிருப்பார். மூன்றாவதாக, அதே மாடலிடம் தானே ஒரு கேள்வி கேட்டு, பதிலைப் பார்த்து, “இது நான் சொல்லியிருக்க மாட்டேன் பா” என்று குறிப்பு எழுதியிருப்பார். அந்தக் குறிப்பும் அந்த மாடலுக்கு டேட்டாவாக போயிருக்கும். ஒரு லூப். அவருக்குப் பிடித்திருக்கும்.
ஒருநாள் அந்த சுஜாதா AI வேலை செய்தால் உங்களுக்கு தெரிவிக்கிறேன். வேலை செய்யவில்லை என்றால், அதுவும் சரிதான்.
உங்கள் கருத்துக்கள், யோசனைகளை வரவேற்கிறேன். அதுவரை, சுஜாதாவைப் படித்துக்கொண்டிருங்கள். 🙂
ஹாப்பி பர்த்டே வாத்யாரே!
writer sujatha’s digital museum -
I Have Aged Waiting for a Text
Cupid Pigeon of MPH I have a small confession to make, which is the only kind of confession I’m interested in. I sent a text to a group of friends asking where we should eat, and then I sat at my desk and watched the screen the way people in old movies used to watch the door.
Three of them started typing. I could see all three at once, the small grey ellipses blinking away in what I can only describe as a committee. Then one of them stopped. Then another one started. Then the first one started again, having presumably reconsidered. For a full minute, possibly longer, my friends were typing, which is a verb the phone has invented to mean “in the process of having an opinion they have not yet seen fit to share with you.” Nothing came through. I made a cup of coffee. I checked my email. I came back. They were still typing.
By the time the first reply landed, somewhere with rava dosa and coffee?, ninety seconds had passed, and I had aged, by my own accounting, somewhere between four and seven years.
I don’t know when this happened to me. I don’t know when it happened to any of us. But it has, and I think we should probably talk about it, because once you start to notice it you can’t stop, and you might as well have company.
It used to be that silence was the default condition of most relationships. You wrote someone a letter, and then you went about your week, and you didn’t think about that letter again for days, because nothing was going to come back for a while and you knew it. The waiting was built into the structure of the thing, like the spine of a book. You didn’t have to wait at anyone. You just lived your life, and eventually a reply showed up, and you read it standing at the kitchen counter, probably while eating something straight out of the container, which is where I read everything important.
Now silence is a sentence. It has subjects and verbs and, increasingly, accusations. A friend who hasn’t responded in two hours is having a feeling about you. An email that’s been read but unanswered means something, and what it means is rarely good. The pause in a video call that goes on one beat too long (you know the one, where everyone’s face freezes in that particular way that makes them look like they’re being interrogated by the KGB), that pause is full of meaning now, even when it’s only full of bandwidth.
The conventional wisdom is that everything got faster, and this is the kind of thing people say at dinner parties when they want to sound thoughtful without actually committing to a thought. The pace of life, they say, gravely, as if pace were a substance you could measure. The phones got faster. The internet got faster. The deliveries, the planes, the payments, the news. All faster. This is true in the way that “it’s warmer than it used to be” is true. Accurate, unhelpful, and slightly beside the point.
Paul Julius Reuter is worth a small detour here. Reuter is the man whose name ended up on the news service, although nobody thinks about that anymore, the way nobody thinks about Mr. Hoover when they vacuum.
In the 1850s, Reuter had a problem, which was that the telegraph network of continental Europe had a hundred-mile gap in it between Aachen and Brussels. A hundred miles of nothing, electrically speaking. If you were a merchant in Brussels and you wanted to know what was happening on the Paris exchange, the news came by train, and it came at a leisurely pace, the way everything came in the 1850s, which is one of the reasons I sometimes think I was born in the wrong century, although I’d miss air conditioning.
Reuter solved this problem with pigeons. I love that the answer to a continental information bottleneck in the middle of the Industrial Revolution was birds. I love that he set up an actual relay system, with little canisters strapped to their tiny pigeon legs, like something a child would invent and then be told was unrealistic. I love that the pigeons flew the gap in about two hours, and that this was, at the time, considered miraculous, when in fact it was just considered miraculous to the people who needed to know things faster than the other people who needed to know things.
And I love, while we’re at it, that pigeons have been pressed into emotional service across most of human history. Salman Khan and Bhagyashree in Maine Pyar Kiya, sending a pigeon back and forth, singing kabootar ja, ja, ja. Seven and a half minutes which I am willing to argue, against considerable resistance, are the beating heart of 1980s Hindi cinema. If you have ever seen the film, you cannot get the song out of your head. If you have not, well, you have just watched it, and now neither can you. Essentially the same technology Reuter used, only deployed for love instead of grain futures. The pigeons did not know the difference. The pigeons were the part that worked.
He wasn’t the first person to use pigeons. He wasn’t even particularly fast in any absolute sense. The telegraph eventually closed the gap and made his birds obsolete within a few years, which is a lesson about innovation I’d rather not dwell on. None of that is what matters.
What matters is what happened to everyone else. Because the moment Reuter’s pigeons started arriving with stock prices before lunch, every trader in Brussels who wasn’t getting Reuter’s pigeons was suddenly trading on information that had already gone slightly off, like milk you keep meaning to throw out. They didn’t know it had gone off. The information looked the same. But the man across the room knew the same thing they knew, only he’d known it for three hours longer, and three hours is the difference between being early and being late, which is the difference, in markets and in life, between being right and being a fool.
Reuter didn’t invent speed. He invented the expectation of speed, which is a much more dangerous invention, and which we have been refining ever since.
This is the part nobody talks about. Letters took days, then the telegraph cut it to hours, then the telephone cut it to minutes, then messaging cut it to seconds, and each step gets told as a story about wires and cables and satellites, as if the technology were the point. The technology is not the point. The technology is the costume. The point is what happened to the waiting. A week used to be a normal interval. Then a week became impolite. A day became neglectful. An hour became suspicious. We are now in a place where four minutes can constitute, in certain relationships, a small betrayal, and I am not exaggerating, although I’d like to be, because I’d prefer to be exaggerating about this.
What we call the pace of life is really the length of our feedback loops. When the loops were long, you could put things inside them. You could write a letter and then forget you’d written it, and have a whole week of your own life before the reply showed up to remind you what you’d been thinking. You could change your mind, and nobody would know you ever held the first opinion. You could ask a question and let the asking dissolve into the day, and by the time the answer came you might not even need it anymore, which is, I would argue, the natural fate of most questions and probably the best one.
Now there are no loops. Or rather, the loops are so short they don’t have anything inside them. The asking and the answering happen in the same breath, and the small private space that used to exist between them (the space where you could be uncertain, or wrong, or just tired) has closed up. I think about that space a lot. I think it was where most of ordinary life used to happen.
So I send my text about lunch, and I watch three of my friends type and stop and type and stop, and what I’m really watching, I think, is a gap that used to be there and isn’t anymore. The waiting hasn’t gotten harder. It’s that there used to be so much more of it, distributed quietly through every hour of every day, padding the corners of everything, like the lining inside a good coat.
The world didn’t get faster. It just learned to answer back. And we, standing over our phones at midnight, learned to expect it to. Bring back the pigeons, I want to say, although I know what would happen. Within a year we would be checking the sky every nine seconds, wondering what was taking so long.
kirukkal.com 